This lecture examines the socio-political dynamics behind the ‘smart cities’ policy project and technocracy more generally. It begins with an overview of common practices and policy narratives concerning smart cities, focusing on Hong Kong. The lecture then visits debates around the definition of smartness and how they reflect evolving scholarly understandings about the relationship between technocracy and social dynamics. An overview of three empirical studies about smart cities perceptions in Hong Kong is presented. The lecture concludes by outlining how the smart cities agenda can be viewed from a more critical-theoretical perspective, placing smart cities within a long-running succession of high-modernist concepts fundamentally rooted in policy-instrumental rationalism. I discuss how increasingly intractable and systemic policy challenges are calling into question the legitimacy of legacy governing concepts and how they require new ways of thinking about policy science.